If everybody in this thread really understood these bigots and their place in the zeitgeist as well as they insist they do, November 8 wouldn’t have come as a surprise, and may even have been preventable. Regarding this particular documentary though, paying for interviews is shady.

That’s an interesting perspective. What level of convincingness would you want from the robot to make it worthwhile? What sort of conversations would you want it to be able to take part in?

This makes me wonder whether she likes robots because she specifically doesn’t like having a partner with intelligence and personality, or because she just doesn’t like the way squooshy human flesh feels. If it’s the former, it’s kind of creepy, but if it’s the latter, maybe she could have a real person tele-operate…

I think the Great Man theory works, but only as applied to negative developments. The things leaders have to do to be good leaders are pretty consistent; you can disagree about policy, but in the broad strokes there will usually be a set of actions that can/must be taken to improve the world that are pretty obvious to…

He probably learned about it from that Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode.

She was also a very successful businesswoman selling beauty products and beautician training specifically for black women.

The point is, in this case it turns out the US didn’t necessarily win. There’s no credible legal framework that requires one nation to forever respect the “right-of-conquest” of another more powerful nation to take its territory. The Moors once conquered Spain, and the fact that they “won” didn’t convince the…

Have you ever read Stephen King’s It? Because I’m reading the wikipedia page on Waco...

It also had a famous lynching in 1916, and got hit by a tornado in 1953 that tied for the deadliest in Texas history. If you’ve ever read Stephen King’s It, Waco seems basically like a real-life Derry.

When one of the sites posts an article about gay people being denied service in stores, and says something like “gay people have the right to be served like anyone else,” I wonder if these people pop up and say “Not if they don’t have shoes or shirts!” in the comments.

A lot of the time they guess the twists using a sort of “meta-reasoning,” where they use knowledge of the classic tropes of fiction to figure out what the writers are trying to do. Classic tropes are classic because they’re good, so I see your point.

It kind of makes you wonder how writers are going to make thrilling or shocking shows, now that there is a networked army of nerds working to ferret out any conceivable lead or clue in popular TV. Before you had to outwit the individual viewer, now you have to outwit an informal NSA.

“Theocratic” would be closer.

Wasn’t this supposed to not be possible? I thought this only happened on The Mentalist.

-I hope Theresa gets her own Host copy, because the actor is one of the better ones on the show.

I think it was in an early season of Veep.

I said this in another article and I’ll say it again, noticing the spelling of some of the graffiti:

I read this article from the Guardian in which they quote his policy pledges from last month. Anybody else notice how many [sic]’s there were? Donald Trump is basically a human [sic].

It’s kind of funny though, because big companies were how the media originally developed journalistic standards. Back in the day, newspapers were just tiny, opinionated local newsletters not too dissimilar to blogs. Then they got acquired and combined into national newspapers by large publishers, and had to remove…

The only people polls reflect are the people willing to take a cell phone call from a polling agency, and those people are almost as strange a bunch of weirdos as internet commenters.